The macro-case of the Junta’s guarantees in Andalusia is coming to an end. The investigation, which began a decade ago to analyse the million-dollar public aid granted to companies by the public agency Idea during the socialist era, will end with a shelving after a fundamental resolution that this Wednesday leads to its total closure.
The 6th Court of Instruction of Seville began the investigation for embezzlement and prevarication in 2014 and a year ago the Court of Seville closed the case due to a formal defect in the regulated guarantees – granted under an order of the Ministry of Innovation in 2008 – but left the exceptional guarantees that were granted out of order alive to investigate. Now the magistrates of the Court have corrected their own criteria and, due to another similar formal error, have closed the first of the 19 investigations that make up these exceptional aids. In this way, for procedural coherence, the 19 pieces on guarantees that remained under investigation will be closed and the case, which the PP called “the biggest case of corruption in democracy” led by the socialist governments, will be completely closed.
The judges’ decision concludes that the Sixth Court of Instruction, where the case of fraudulent EREs was initiated in 2011, has violated the legal deadlines for investigation according to article 324 of the Criminal Procedure Law, also with the group of exceptional guarantees, not only with the regulated ones. The Court’s ruling clarifies that the case of the Tartessos Car firm, which received a guarantee of 1.5 million, is linked by a common thread with the main cause, so it should respect the times stipulated in the law and the consequent mandatory extensions.
The Civil Guard’s thesis
The initial thesis of the Civil Guard in the macro-case was that former senior officials of the Junta allegedly favoured dozens of companies since 2008 by diverting public funds “arbitrarily, with a lack of publicity and without authorisation from the European Commission” after these same companies had already benefited from the ERE fund.
Although the court opened the Avales II case in 2017 so that the investigations could be separated into two groups, Avales I and Avales II; in 2021 the macro-case was joined again by order of Judge José Ignacio Vilaplana. For this reason, the judges now reason that this Tartessos Car case should not have been separated in the beginning, since its procedural object was already being investigated from the parent case. That is, it maintained a common thread with the initial investigation and, therefore, should respect the procedural times of the original case.
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“Both the facts under investigation and the persons charged in relation to them (…) were already being investigated in the main proceedings, even before the guarantee case had a proper name,” underlines the order of the First Section of the Court. And they add: “The guarantee granted to the company Tartessos Car was already contemplated in the main investigation since 2013, and declarations had also been agreed with the condition of being investigated.” That is why the judges consider that the order of complexity of the case in 2017 was issued out of time.
The judges clarify why the division of the macro-case was unnatural: “It is one thing to form separate parts to investigate new facts (or people) revealed in the course of an investigation, and quite another to do so for mere practical reasons to simplify and speed up the procedure, but with the same objective as the main case, in which case the investigative deadlines applicable to this must be respected.”
One of the defense attorneys who resorted to this route of the connection of the case with the parent company, Juan Carlos Alférez of the law firm Constitución 23, praises the decision to close the case: “The decision is of enormous legal stature and solves with solvency a legal issue of enormous importance and complexity. In practice, our clients will be acquitted, since they were all called to the process after the expiration date that the Court has set for us.”
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